My mom is a children’s librarian. When she comes to visit, she usually brings cool books or book-related activities for the girls to do. This is great, because I’m not always so great at coming up with stuff like this for them (says the mom who is planning to homeschool her kids when they begin kindergarten … yikes). During my parents’ recent visit she brought a fun project to go with the new book “The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse” by Eric Carle.
We love Eric Carle books. We have a ton of them. With this new book the publisher is doing some sort of marketing thing where they encourage kids to “paint” their own horse picture, using the printable you can find here, and mail it to Mr. Carle. So, we did.
We mailed them off the other day. Miss was excited about sending them to Mr. Carle, though she didn’t really understand what he would do with them (nor do I). As a nice side note, the activity prompted lots of discussion about authors and artists and the mail and addresses and how all that works.
After reading this book and talking about how books get made, Miss asked to make a book to give to my husband when he came home from his trip. She titled it “Wee Willy Winky” and had me write that on each page that she illustrated with her art work. I’m thinking I might print out some other pics like this horse and let the girls color and put together their own books.
They are quite into being “artists” after reading this. Awesome.
